เข้าสู่ระบบMelina closed her eyes.Opened them."Okay," she said."Are you ...." Petra stopped. Started again more carefully. "Are you alright?"Melina thought about that question. Genuinely thought about it for a moment, standing in her doorway with damp hair and last night sitting heavy in her chest and her shoes placed neatly at the foot of her bed by hands she could still feel on her face."Fine," she said.Petra's expression said she believed that completely."Okay," Petra said. She picked up her cart. Started moving down the corridor. Then stopped. Turned back."For what it's worth," she said, quietly this time, the performance gone out of it. "He looked...." She paused. Searched for the word. "Careful. When he was carrying you. He looked careful."She turned back and left.Melina stood in the doorway for a moment after she left.Then she closed the door very slowly.Stood in the middle of her room.Looked at her shoes at the foot of the bed.Careful.She pressed two fingers against her mo
POV: MelinaShe woke up slowly.Not all at once. In pieces. Awareness coming back layer by layer the way it did when sleep had been particularly deep....first the ceiling, then the light coming through the curtains, then the specific smell of her own room.She was in her room.She was in her room and she was in her bed and she was fully dressed except for her shoes which were sitting neatly side by side at the foot of the bed like someone had placed them there carefully.She stared at the ceiling.Her head was heavy. Not painfully....just weighted, thick, the particular density of a head that had processed a significant amount of expensive wine the night before. Her mouth was dry. Her body felt.....She closed her eyes.Her body felt like how it felt when she woke up from the dream.That same specific warmth. That same oversensitivity. That low deep ache that started in her thighs and radiated outward and had nothing to do with any nightmare and everything to do with.....She pressed
He kissed her slowly.Like he'd been deciding how to do this for days and had finally landed on thorough as the only acceptable approach. One hand in her hair, tilting her head back slightly, his mouth moving against hers with a patience that made her fingers curl against her thighs.She made a sound.Soft and involuntary and completely honest, the kind of sound that came from somewhere she didn't have control over, and she felt him smile against her mouth when he heard it.Behind her Archer's hand had moved higher on her thigh.She pulled back from Aiden gasping. "I....""It's okay," Archer said. His lips were against her ear, his voice low and warm and doing nothing to help her think straight. His fingers had reached the hem of her skirt and were tracing slow lines along the inside of her thigh. "We've got you Sera. We've always got you."Those words.She didn't know why those words did what they did to her. Just that they went somewhere deep and quiet and something in her that had
Her face went warm.Archer said something else....she wasn't even listening to the words anymore, just the rhythm of them....and she felt the smile happening before she could decide not to let it and she looked away from all of them and fixed her eyes on the fire.The fire was very unhelpful.It was very warm and very orange and it was making everything feel softer than it should.She took another sip of wine.She didn't notice Archer's chair moving.That was the thing about him. He never did anything suddenly. Everything was gradual, incremental, happening in the space between one moment and the next so that by the time she registered it it had already been happening for a while.His knee was touching hers under the table.She looked down at the tablecloth. Then back up. He was talking to Alaric about something, his face turned away from her, completely unbothered. Like his knee was doing something entirely independent of the rest of him.She should move her leg.She thought about mo
POV: MelinaMrs Harrow found her at four."The private dining staff are sick," she said, not looking up from her clipboard. "Both of them. Tonight's service falls to you."Melina looked at her. "Private dining.""The Alpha. Seven o'clock." Mrs Harrow was already moving down the corridor. "You've proven discreet. Don't be late."Melina stood there for a moment after she left.Then she went to get her uniform.***She stood outside the private dining room at six fifty-eight.Tray in hand. Uniform straight. Hair pinned back so tightly her scalp ached. She'd checked her reflection three times before leaving her room and each time it had looked back at her with the same blank professional expression she'd been wearing like armor since day one.She was fine.She pushed the door open.All three of them were already seated at the round table, mid-conversation, jackets off, the particular ease of men in their own space. They looked up at the same time when she entered....black eyes, green eyes
POV: MelinaIt was waiting on her bed when she got back from her shift.A white envelope with the hospital's name printed in the top left corner. Someone from admin must have slipped it under her door while she was working. She stood in the doorway and looked at it for a moment before she went inside and closed the door and picked it up.She didn't open it immediately.She sat on the edge of the bed with it in her hands and looked at her mother's file number printed across the front and just held it. The envelope was thin. Single page inside, maybe two. She'd gotten enough of these to know that the thin ones were never good news. Good news came in thick envelopes....treatment plans, recovery schedules, follow-up appointments. Things that required pages.This was thin.She opened it.She read it twice.The first time the words moved through her without landing properly. Medical language doing what medical language did....building distance between the information and the person receivin







